In a letter written on April 15, 1939 to his secretary Daniel Cory, Santayana wrote that "...if there was a war, I could keep my thoughts on distant things by writing my recollections, I mean Persons & Places." The first of the three volumes was completed during 1941, and despite the war the manuscript eventually reached the United States. In The Background of My Life (1944), he recalls the formative influences on his life, his birth in Avila, Spain, his parents, and his education in America. The Middle Span (1945) begins in 1886 in Germany, where he spent two years studying for his doctoral degree; it includes his travels to England and Avila and then his years teaching at his alma mater, Harvard, ending in 1912 with his resignation. My Host the World (1953), the final volume, tells of his later years in England and in Rome, where he retired to live in the convent nursing home at the Church of San Stefano Rotundo, which was under the supervision of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary.